BA430 Unit 5 Descriptive Assessment Paper Example

What the Narrative Notes Missed: A BA430 Unit 5 Descriptive Assessment Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

BA430: Behavior Assessment

Unit 5 Descriptive Assessment Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the cooperative, the student, the staff and every figure are composite and illustrative; the articles and book cited are real.

Watching Transitions

After the indirect assessment, the team's hypothesis about Kou's screaming at school was that the truck, the noisy gym or the two together might be what kept it going. The next step was descriptive assessment: recording antecedents, behavior and consequences as they occurred naturally during the school day, without changing anything. Descriptive data show what actually happens around a behavior, which indirect reports can only estimate.

Kou's paraprofessional had already kept narrative notes for three weeks before I arrived. Most entries read like this: "11:50, lining up, Kou screamed and dropped. I talked to him and calmed him down. Attention." Of twenty-two entries, eighteen ended with the word "attention."

Narrative and Structured Formats

Lerman et al. (2009) compared the accuracy of descriptive data collected by teachers using two formats. In narrative recording, teachers wrote free descriptions of what happened before and after each episode. In structured recording, they checked boxes from lists of specific antecedents and consequences. Teachers' records were compared with those of trained observers. Accuracy was generally higher with the structured format, and narrative records often omitted or misdescribed events, especially consequences.

The paraprofessional's notes illustrated the problem. "I talked to him" described her own response, which was attention, but it did not record whether the truck was returned or whether the class left for the gym without him, both of which also happened in many episodes.

Every note recorded what the adult did; almost none recorded what Kou got.

The Structured Form

With my supervisor, I designed a one-page structured form for the six daily transitions. Antecedents included: asked to put away an item, asked to line up, loud setting ahead, peer close by and adult hand-holding. Consequences included: item returned, allowed to stay in the room, verbal attention, physical comfort, and transition delayed. Each episode received one check per applicable box, so several consequences could be recorded together. I trained the paraprofessional on the form with three practice videos, and we both recorded for the first three days to check agreement, which reached 85 percent on consequences by the third day.

Two Weeks of Data

Over ten school days, the structured form recorded thirty-four episodes of screaming during transitions. Twenty-eight occurred at transitions that required putting away an item, and twenty-six occurred before transitions to the gym or the bus line, both loud settings. Only four occurred at transitions to the quiet library, and none of those involved an item being put away.

Consequences were mixed. Verbal attention followed thirty-one of thirty-four episodes, which explains the narrative notes; staff almost always talked to him. But the truck or another item was returned in twenty-three episodes, and the transition was delayed by more than two minutes in twenty-five.

Conditional Probabilities

A raw count of consequences can mislead, because a consequence that follows behavior often may also occur often when no behavior happens. I calculated conditional probabilities: the probability of each consequence given screaming, compared with its probability during transitions without screaming. I also recorded twenty transitions without screaming over the same days.

Attention followed screaming in 91 percent of episodes but also occurred in 80 percent of calm transitions, because staff routinely talked to Kou as they walked. The difference was small. Return of the item followed screaming in 68 percent of episodes but occurred in only 10 percent of calm transitions. Delay of the transition followed screaming in 74 percent of episodes and in 5 percent of calm ones. These comparisons suggested that item return and delay were more closely tied to screaming than attention was.

Why Descriptive Data Cannot Confirm Function

Thompson and Iwata (2007) compared the results of descriptive analyses with those of functional analyses for individuals with problem behavior. They found that the two methods often disagreed, and that attention frequently followed problem behavior in descriptive data even when functional analyses showed another function. Their explanation was that caregivers commonly respond to problem behavior with attention regardless of what maintains it, so attention appears in descriptive records as a matter of course.

Kou's data showed the same pattern. Attention followed almost every episode because the adults always responded verbally, not necessarily because it maintained the screaming. Even the conditional probabilities showed only correlation. Item return and delay were associated with screaming, but descriptive data cannot show whether they cause it, and the two were confounded: in most episodes, both happened together. The data narrowed the hypothesis but could not separate the two variables.

Recording Antecedents Carefully

The antecedent data were as useful as the consequence data. Screaming was rare at quiet transitions and common at loud ones, and common when an item had to be put away. Cooper et al. (2020) note that antecedent patterns can suggest motivating operations, conditions that change the value of a reinforcer. For Kou, noise ahead might make escape from the gym more valuable, and losing the truck might make its return more valuable.

A Scatterplot for Brynn

Descriptive assessment took a different form in Brynn's case, where the question was when rather than what. Her teachers marked each worksheet tearing on a scatterplot grid divided into half-hour blocks across the school week, and her mother's sleep log recorded whether Brynn had slept poorly the night before. Over three weeks, nineteen of twenty-four tearing episodes fell before 10:30 in the morning, and fifteen followed nights her mother had marked as poor. The pattern fit the setting event identified in the record review. It did not show what the tearing produced, so her teacher added two consequence boxes to the grid, work removed and adult came over, for the following three weeks. Even a simple grid can point an assessment toward the right hour.

What Comes Next

Because item return and escape from noise were confounded in the natural setting, the team planned a brief functional analysis with my supervisor to test them separately, with conditions in which only the toy, or only the quiet setting, followed screaming. The structured form would continue in the meantime to track the baseline.

Conclusion

Narrative notes recorded attention after most of Kou's screaming because they recorded what adults did. A structured form, checked for agreement as Lerman and colleagues recommend, showed that item return and delayed transitions were closely tied to screaming while attention was nearly constant. Thompson and Iwata's findings explained why descriptive data still could not confirm function, and why a functional analysis was the next step.

References

Cooper, J. O., Heron, T. E., & Heward, W. L. (2020). Applied behavior analysis (3rd ed.). Pearson.

Lerman, D. C., Hovanetz, A., Strobel, M., & Tetreault, A. (2009). Accuracy of teacher-collected descriptive analysis data: A comparison of narrative and structured recording formats. Journal of Behavioral Education, 18(2), 157-172. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10864-009-9084-7

Thompson, R. H., & Iwata, B. A. (2007). A comparison of outcomes from descriptive and functional analyses of problem behavior. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 40(2), 333-338. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.2007.56-06